Without spending thousands of dollars for advertising, you can get free word of mouth marketing if you listen to your customers and care about them.

This post is just one of the many successful examples of social media word of mouth marketing.

Justin Bieber, the 16 year old Canadian singer, flew out on Air New Zealand flight and had a very good experience. Just like how everyone these days are tweeting everything they experience in their life, Justin also tweeted about his flight experience as below:

This is one of the best things Air New Zealand can ask for. The interesting thing is not the tweet but the after effect.

More than 600 people Retweeted (RT) the update (according to twitter search)

If you see the stats from Tweet Reach, they are much more interesting.

The starts are for the latest 50 tweets.

As you can see, the latest 50 tweets alone have reached 14,763 people. Now I wonder how many people the 600+ retweets would have reached. Easily 100,000 I would guess.

And I’m sure many more twitterers (and Bieber fans) will RT the update for a few more days.

Media coverage

Air New Zealand not only enjoyed the benefits from twitter but also from online news. Many of the blogs have written about Justin Bieber’s tweet.

Air New Zealand’s Reply

The CEO of Air New Zealand, Rob Fyfe, thanked Justin Bieber just in time. He sent him the following tweet:

Air New Zealand provided great customer service and they got the reward that they deserved. So if you run a business, concentrate on providing great service and have a social media presence. Justin Bieber might not use your service and tweet about it. But to improve your brand name and recognition, you don’t need Justin Bieber, just a couple of people with 500 followers would be enough.

P.S.: All the businesses and individuals out there, who think twitter is just a waste of time, think again.

Most of the bloggers, internet marketers and even celebrities have started tweeting and you need no other reason to join twitter. If you are not there in twitter, you are missing something. Join twitter right now. And don’t forget to add me.

Twitter backgrounds are to decorate your profile and make it look good. It will sometimes convince people to follow you. If you are using a default twitter background, it is time to change.

Before letting you know the service that allows you to have your latest flickr image as twitter background, I’ll point out some reasons why you should have a good flickr background (but you can always scroll down to see the service).

1. Convinces the twitter users, who have decided not to follow you, to follow you (at times)

2. Gives an exciting, scintillating, dazzling, brilliant, and amusing plus “enter all the synonyms here” twitter background. (Of course, only if you have that kind of a picture in flickr)

3. Attract designers and photographers

4. Fresh background everyday (if you upload a picture everyday)

And a lot more…

What is the service I am talking about?

It is Flickr my background. It is a service started by sawhorse whose other projects include the famous shorty awards.

1. Go to Flickr my background page

2. Fill the details they ask you

3. Validate your flickr account

4. Go to your twitter homepage and see the latest flickr image being shown as your twitter background

It is as simple as that.

If you want to stop using flickr my background, go their website and see at the bottom where they say “click here to stop updating your twitter background”.

Now you have a constantly changing twitter background.

Follow me on twitter here.

Do you log into twitter, update your status the whole day and do less or nothing related to your online work? Are you trying to limit your twitter usage but cannot? If your answer is yes to the questions, continue reading the post as I show you the 5 ways that I use to limit the time I spend in twitter.

Twitter is addictive. I used to spend a lot of time refreshing my twitter page and sending updates many times a day. I found myself to be less productive when I spent a lot of time in twitter. I don’t say you shouldn’t use twitter but I’m telling you to limit the time spent in twitter. In the past 20 days, I have sent only around 5 tweets. But I have become more productive. You can use a little more than that but not too much.

1. Install A Twitter Client
By installing a twitter client, you don’t need to refresh your twitter page now and then to check if you have got any tweets. You will be updated with the latest tweets automatically. You will also be alerted when you receive a direct message. Sometimes using a twitter client will make you to use twitter more. But if you use the twitter clients properly, you should save a lot of time. Here are two resources with a list of twitter clients:
# How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients
# A List From Twitter

2. Keep Your Busy With Other Works
This is simple. How to stop doing something? Keep yourself busy doing something else which is more important. For instance, you can keep yourself busy writing articles or reading books to limit your twitter usage. The more you keep yourself busy, the lesser time you will spend in twitter.

3. Twitter Is Down
Create a mindset that twitter is down. Twitter has had lot of downtimes. A month ago, twitter had continuous downtimes. I used to log into twitter only to find that it is down. It happened for a few days. Later twitter started to get back to normal. I created a mindset that twitter is down and stopped visiting twitter many times day.

4. What’s In It For Me
Ask yourself “What’s in it for me?” every time you log into twitter. Use twitter when you want to get something from it. If you feel the need for getting new friends, log into twitter. If you have something extremely important to share with twitter users, sign into twitter. There is nothing that you can gain by spending hours in twitter.

5. A Plan
Create a plan. Allocate a specific amount of time for using twitter. If you are a person who uses twitter 5+ hours a day, you must consider limiting it to 2 hours. Once you are at 2 hours a day, reduce it to 1 hour a day. This is surely possible. With a little effort, you can considerably reduce the time you spend on twitter.

Do you spend a lot of time in twitter? Were these points useful? What do you do to limit your twitter usage? Please share it in the comments.

Twitter is good and I use it everyday to get new friends and to have touch with those who are already my friends. Suddenly, many blogs have started to write about twitter. The reason? Well I don’t know. I have written a post on twitter too. You can read that post here which emphasizes on how to get more twitter friends.

Fine, let’s see few blogs which have blogger about twitter and also some other references.

Take a look at the Social Media category of Sphinn, a social media site which I like.

Social Media Category in Sphinn

The above is the link to the hot topic in the social media category of sphinn. You can see many blog posts in the hot topic column about twitter.

Also many big blogs have started to write about twitter.

Search Engine Land had a post about twitter. It was on the topic “Twitter Wrote This Column For Me“. It was a very interesting post filled up with the answers of the people to the questions asked in twitter.

You can also read Read Write Web writing on Twitter. It was on “How We Use Twitter For Journalism“.

So what is the reason behind sudden increase in the number posts about twitter? Please share it in the comments.

You can also add me on twitter here.